Saotome Ranma wrote:yawetaG wrote:The reason they're common in Japan is that a variety of Pentium systems by Fujitsu and others came with them by default.
You can probably buy a complete working system for less than the price of one of those cards...
Yes, maybe u r right. But I've seen many of them without OPL chips on, The ones with true OPL are really uncommon IMO.
I've also seen some cheap Fujitsu or Sharp pentium rigs here, but most of them are quite odd in their layouts and output ports, especially like the NEC PC-98 series.
NEC PC-98 are not compatible with regular x86 systems, it's like an alternate branch of the x86 tree. AFAIK, up to the Pentium era most Japanese manufacturers had their proprietary systems that in general had no or limited compatibility with the rest of the world's x86-based systems.
So you had Sharp with their x68000 systems, NEC with their PC-88 and later PC-98 systems, Fujitsu with their FM-R range, etc. Each of those use either a proprietary OS or their own version of MS-DOS/Windows that is not compatible with x86 MS-DOS/Windows. It started to change with the introduction of Windows 95 and its greater abstraction from the underlying hardware.
If I lived in Japan I'd go nuts with all of the really odd and interesting proprietary systems that exist there. 🤣
x86-compatible systems are listed in separate categories ("PC hardware -> Windows", IIRC) than the proprietary ones, and type numbers can be googled with ease, as there are sites listing all the specs for systems ranging back to the mid-1990s.
Those less than 30 USD rigs are usually sold as uncheck & untested "JUNK GOODS" without any guarantee and lack of their special accessories. I don't wanna risk myself too much on weird rigs I am not familiar with.
"junk" in Japanese auctions doesn't mean the same thing as "junk" in the West, it simply means "I don't know what this is, it may work, but I won't accept any responsibility if something doesn't work as advertised", i.e. simply sellers who are not experts on the items they sell like you also find on Ebay. I've bought items listed as "junk" that were absolutely pristine, and in general real junk is pretty hard to find on Y! Auctions Japan (if you skip the obviously rusted/dirty/muddy/broken crap). Japanese sellers usually are much more honest in describing their ware than US and European sellers. I've been screwed over more often on Ebay than via Y! Auctions Japan, despite buying way less from Ebay...
The tested workable ones are normally very expensive (over 150~200 USD). Besides, most of them are integrated with some useless graphic chips (ATI rage/NV riva 128) or with a quite small graphic ram (1MB or 2MB), working under some kinds of special japanese-text based system, not much room to choose ur owned things urself.
I think you should put some more time in researching stuff, because this is simply quite untrue, unless you speak of 1980s and early 1990s systems (and even then...take your time, research, and you'll find gems, like on Ebay 15 years ago...).
